After the patch launched I was really bummed out that the Harrowing map was gone. The art team did an amazing job with it, and it seemed a shame to let it disappear after just a few short weeks in rotation.
Well thankfully, it’s coming back. The map will be in rotation in place of the winter map until this year’s Snowdown Showdown. It’s not back yet, but it should be soon enough.
A good friend of mine has long been in love with Kassadin. He loves the playstyle, but he really hates Kassadin’s early game. You know, that long, slow period before you hit level six and really get to have some fun.
We spend a lot of time talking about game design and champion design and what could be done differently. For Kassadin, we often return to the idea that his ult should be one of his three main skills, giving him the ability to blink earlier in the game, albeit with some reduced effectiveness.
Enter LeBlanc. LeBlanc is the kind of toon design that rubs me the wrong way because it borrows an existing paradigm and vastly improves upon it. Every game I played Leblanc I was shocked by how much she feels like Kassadin. Granted, she can’t teleport quite as far, but I think she makes up for it with her insane burst and the added control from her Ethereal Chains. In fact, I played Kassadin against a LeBlanc and got schooled during the laning phase for a couple reasons.
First, she’s ranged. It’s a huge farming advantage against a melee toon like Kassadin because it keeps her at a safe distance. If Kassadin wants to farm, he can either last hit with Null Sphere at the cost of mana, or he can get into melee range and get his ass handed to him. The LeBlanc Sigil -> Distortion combo is nasty against melee toons if done right, and unfortunately, Kassadin is a melee toon.
The thing is, LeBlanc is a lot of fun to play. She’s highly mobile, and it feels great to land your combo perfectly. It makes me sad that they haven’t put more effort into Kassadin’s design because they are so similar, but LeBlanc is just a stronger toon.
As much fun as LeBlanc is, I think Riot dropped the ball in a couple places with her design. First, the fact that she can blink to a location, deal big damage, and immediately blink back feels like really bad design. There’s virtually no risk, unless you manage to get silenced/snared in the .2 seconds you’re at your target location. That kind of mobility should come at some sort of cost, like it does for Kassadin.
The second problem is her passive, which I think fits really well into Zileas’ “or we could just fuck the player” design theme. LeBlanc’s passive isn’t all that effective at fooling the player. Once you know what it does, or know that you can ping LeBlanc before the passive procs and the real one will still be marked afterward, it’s just a matter of waiting the .5 seconds for her to reappear. For melee toons and auto attackers, the passive is actually a bit worse. Those kind of champions right click the enemy a lot, and when LeBlanc disappears it breaks both their auto attacks and their movement path. The players haven’t been fooled – LeBlanc can only be running just a few steps away unless distortion is off cooldown – they’ve been screwed by a mechanic that breaks the way the player plays the game, not the game itself. It’s the same reason Mind Control is such a frustrating mechanic in WoW, or the trick in a lot of games where suddenly your controls don’t work like they should (up is now left, left is now right, right is down, etc.) – those things artificially limit your ability to play the game as well as you otherwise could.
There is a way around it, but it’s something a lot of players either won’t know about or rarely use. When I chase champions, I click the ground ahead of them and use attack-move (press ‘a’ and left-click a spot on the ground) to land my auto attacks. It’s an old Dota tactic similar to orb-walking, and it makes LeBlanc’s passive as useless as it is against a caster.
Overall, I still like LeBlanc. I think she fits into the game much better than a lot of recent releases. I wish she wasn’t so much like Kassadin, and I wish her passive was different, but in the end she’s fun to play and not horrible to play against unless she’s hugely fed.
As with every patch, the LeBlanc patch brings some unannounced skins. I’m especially excited to see Malphite getting a respectable skin, though I can tell you right now it’s probably not worth 975. As with most mid-cycle skins, I’ll be waiting for a sale.
I’m not sure why the Janna skin is called Hextech Janna. Some Weird Science reference? The Kennen skin looks pretty great as well. Look for these some time over the weekend.
Every time a new champion releases it serves as a reminder that there are a large number of champions down on their luck, stuck watching new and improved versions of themselves hit the Fields of Justice or wishing their own skills hadn’t been nerfed into oblivion like some carnival-game rodent. Still other champions remain far stronger than they should be, or receive buffs that seem to make no sense. Today, I bring you champions from both those realms, champions I would gladly remove from the game until they can be reworked or simply remove altogether.
1. Galio – Yes, Galio. His ultimate stands as one of the best in the game for a couple reasons. First, and most obviously, the taunt. Taunt is a huge mechanic for any team, mostly because it’s like carry insurance. The best Galios I’ve seen know that if you can’t get to the enemy carry for some crazy reason, you use the ult to get your own carry out of trouble, giving him time to turn around and crush people you’re taunting. You also have to remember that the damage from Galio’s ult scales based on the damage dealt to him during the taunt, so if your fed carry gets caught with your squishy caster, the caster is likely to almost get one-shot. Galio’s ult is also problematic because of the implementation of suppression. Suppression pretty much nullified the use of cleanse for a lot of carries, and because so many other champions have speed boosts and dashes, a lot of carries run Ghost/Flash for survivability. If Galio catches those people they’re screwed.
Galio also has the benefit of being one of the best farmers in the game and one of the best anti-pushers in the game. He can burn through a wave of creeps very early in the game, forcing pushing teams into either a turret soaking teamfight or a stalemate while they wait on creeps. I wouldn’t be sad for a minute if this guy went missing.
2. Garen – I’m sure you expected this one, but it had to be said. Garen’s big problem is that he is insanely unfun to play against. While I understand the design behind his spin – high damage but only if you don’t avoid part of it – the reality is that the damage is very hard to avoid. He gets a speed boost from a skill that also silences you. If that skill lands, he starts to spin, often still boosted for a portion of it, and with a silenced target who now cannot Flash away or use any other skills to mitigate the damage. His ultimate is also extremely frustrating and regularly hits harder than any targeted spell in the game should, in my opinion. I’ve tried to watch closely over the past several days and seen several 800+ damage hits by level 11. That’s fine if he’s 10-0 and has crazy disgusting damage items, but he doesn’t. He has Sunfire Capes.
It’s patch day, and Riot has once again put together a detailed spotlight video for the new champion, LeBlanc. LeBlanc is an all out nuker, to the degree that her ultimate just lets her cast another one of her nukes again, though for increased damage the second time around. From a flavor standpoint, I can’t say I’m all that impressed. When I play nukers, like Annie or Kennen or even Ryze, I like to know that my ultimate is going to cause mass carnage. LeBlanc’s ult only effects one ability, and since most of her skills are single target, I think she’ll end up feeling more like a carry killer – Akali, anyone? – than full on mage.
I’m also a little concerned about her passive. Granted, I’ll have to see how it plays, but the clone idea already exists for Shaco and is fairly easily countered if not for the damage the clone deals. Any time I’m playing against a Shaco, I make sure mark him with a ping before a fight starts. When he hits Hallucinate, the ping stays on the real Shaco. I’d imagine LeBlanc works the same way, although her clone deals no damage, and will likely just stand there auto attacking most of the time. So what’s the benefit? A half second of stealth that will only confuse people who haven’t watched her spotlight/read her skill list? It works for her thematically, but the mechanics are only effective/interesting so long as your opponent doesn’t know how it works. Sounds like weak design to me.
On the whole I’m excited to try her. I do think using her ultimate to chain root someone will be a lot of fun
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